Let's say in the next couple of minutes, you were to get a phone call from, I don't know, your sister, and she says, something's wrong with mom.

They don't quite know what it is, but just to be safe, they're gonna take her to the emergency room.

Now, maybe you're like me and you live thousands of miles away from your immediate family.

You've got a new job, you've got few friends, maybe somebody special that's keeping you rooted in this new city.

But most of all, you probably have a routine, the thing you've worked really hard to craft and maintain.

So that way you can live life the way that you want and on the terms that you've chosen, because that is one of the advantages of being grown and an adult.

But your sister calls you back and the doctor is saying a few things that you don't understand, some things that do, but you don't want to hear it because it starts to become very real.

This is happening and I'm not ready, but it's mom.

So routine ni que nada, I would drop everything to help her, right?

Even move back home?

I'm Xorje Olivares, and I'm the son of aging parents, so at some point, I'm gonna be confronted with this very real situation, and I think I know what I would do.

But will I actually go through with it when push comes to shove?

So today I wanna ask, what are we willing to sacrifice right now in order to care for a loved one?

This is Hyphenación, where conversation and cultura meet.

So I'm really happy to have this conversation today with two folks who have been a bit vocal about this very personal topic.

The first is poet and writer, Yosimar Reyes, who has spoken openly not only about migration, queerness, but also about being a caretaker for his grandmother.

So Yosimar, thank you so much for joining us today.

And I wanna share a photo that Yosimar gave us as a team to be able to share with our audience.

Yossi Mar, who is this wonderful woman in this photo?

And did you have a nickname for her?

Did she have a name for you?

Hi, everybody.

This is my Abuelita, Madonia Galiana Dionisio.

Her nickname for me was Gordo.

I've always been known as Gordo, and for her, we just call her Abuelito, or Mama Doña would be the name that we everybody referenced her as.

I love and slightly hate that I feel like growing up, everybody's nickname for children is having to do with weight.

Like either you're flakito, you're morenito, your pretito, I mean, obviously that's more skin tone, but thank you for sharing that, for you it was gordo.

Yeah, usually your parents are your first bully, so you get conditioned into facing the world for them.

Just have a little bit of a thicker skin because of it.

But thank you so much for joining us, Yosimar, for this conversation.

And also joining us is Profe Anita Tijerina Revilla, who is department chair for the Chicanx and Latinx Studies Department at Cal State LA, who's also talked about queer latinidad and about her own journey as a caretaker for her niece and nephew and also for her sister.

So Profe, thank you much for joing us.

And we also have a photo that we'd like to share.

And who are these cute little critters?

Saludos, thank you for having me.

These are my niece and nephew, also my son and daughter.

I adopted them a few years ago.

This is Ray on the right and Michael right next to me and myself, Ray and Michael, my niece and nephew also my daughter and son.

And they call me honey.

Honey.

Ooh, has it always been Honey or has there been a journey to arrive to Honey?

So there's another niece that calls me Honey.

And when she was a baby, she either couldn't say my name or she maybe thought, maybe I called her Honey.

Somehow when she, her first words out of her mouth towards me and identifying me was Honey.

And so she's about 10 years older than these kids.

And every kid after that called me Honey and Honey works really well for the kids because I am their tia, but I'm more than their tía, and their mother is very much a part of their lives.

So we didn't, I didn't want them to call me mom either.

So Honey's perfect.

Honey is so sweet and there's such a term of, it's such term of endearment regardless, like anybody who can call you honey, there's already an element of love that you can't hide from.

So I love that.

And thank you both for sharing both the photos and these names.

But I'm excited for us to have this conversation because it is rooted in family.

And a lot of what's happening for me and my family is we're approaching that point where we're caretaking and caregiving, which I'm gonna use interchangeably.

But this notion of being at home to care for a loved one, it's kind of coming close.

I'm approaching that process of when I'm gonna need to go home to be a caretaker for one of my parents.

And I wanna start with you, Yosimar, if you don't mind, because maybe a few days ago, you did post something on your Instagram that was about this caretaking journey for you.

So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the decision to first even become a care taker for your grandmother.

Yeah, so I'm originally from the state of Guerrero, Mexico.

I migrated to the United States when I was three years old, and it was my grandma who actually carried me across the journey to bring me to this country.

And when we landed here, like so many young people, I was 3, so my mom wanted me to go live with her.

But my grandma was part of those formative years, and so I thought my grandma my mom.

So I had this affinity towards her, and I always wanted to be with her Um, and so my relationship with her has always been me and my grandparents.

I, the one that grew up with my grandparents, um, but, uh, once I graduated college, I went to live in Los Angeles and I was there for about five years.

And then COVID happened.

Um, And so I think out of that, I saw her getting older.

Uh, just, you know, her, just aging.

And so, I decided to make the choice of like, I need to leave.

To go back home and help her.

And yeah, I think that's when I, it wasn't an active choice, but more like something natural that was just happening.

And then I decided to move back home and that's how I ended up taking on the role.

So you wouldn't say it was necessarily because there was this expectation that Yosimar at some point is gonna move back home, take care of Abuelita, that it felt more of an in the moment decision because of the global pandemic that was happening that was forcing us to rethink how we were approaching things.

Yeah, I think it was just a natural course.

I think for me, one of the things that happened between the relationship with me and my grandparents is that you just know what's instinctively, you just now like, this is what I need to do.

And it didn't necessarily feel like a burden or didn't feel like I was making a sacrifice or making a choice.

I was like, this is my calling and this is the next step that I need do.

I love that you're saying a calling because I want to ask you Profe Anita if you think that for you being a caretaker for your niece and nephew was a calling or if it was something else that you had to in the moment, figure out how to respond to.

Yeah, it's funny.

I do not think it was a calling.

I think it was codependence.

And I, you know, I'll tell you a little bit about me in my life.

I grew up with a single parent.

She was widowed at the age of 30.

And my father died also at the around the age 30 at 31.

She had three kids.

And for me, what happened is my sister had grown up.

This is my little Thank you for joining us this year.

And I have an older brother too, but she had grown up with depression her whole life.

We knew it since she was little.

And later on in life, she was clinically diagnosed as bipolar, having bipolar experience and schizoaffective disorder.

And it wasn't until maybe she turned 30 that she started to show or exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia.

And what other people call madness, right?

Like literal madness.

And she started to have delusions and she started having like a deep paranoia.

And so it was also connected to drug addiction and the drug addiction was connected to her depression.

And so all of this is like, again, as I've learned little by little, I've come to understand my sister's experience more.

But back then, all I knew is that my sister was sick and something was happening that we didn't understand.

She had two small children, the ones that you saw.

They were three and four years old.

And the first time she got hospitalized, she was arrested and brutalized by police merely for exhibiting this anger and this madness.

And so she was in the hospital right after she was jailed.

I had to fight to get her out.

And when she got out... She came directly to live with me.

It was my maybe second year as an assistant professor in Las Vegas.

I had just started my career and I had worked my whole life not to be a parent, especially not a teen mom or a single parent.

And those were things that were stigmatized with me growing up.

And now of course I honor single mothers and single parents just like my mother, but that's not what I wanted to be.

I wanted to have a career, I wanted, um, and the only reason I even went to college and wanted a career was to take care of my impoverished family because I had come to believe through my mother that having that education would allow me to help pull them out of their poverty.

And so little by little, those are the messages that I got that you have to take care of your family and you have do sacrifice your, your, you're life to take of the people in your family.

And I accepted it with lots of love, but I don't think there was really choice involved, right?

It was a limited choice.

And it wasn't until much later that I actually said, yeah, I did make a choice, and I'm grateful that I had that opportunity.

And it's one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had to be able to parent children who are now 20 and 21 years old.

They're adults.

And so I... feel honored to have been their safety and the person who took care of them but back then I was mourning and grieving my my life the life that I had um as a single queer person starting in you know a job in Las Vegas as a women's studies professor it was one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do is to parent when I didn't plan on doing it especially for children that young.

I've always known that my siblings and even my mother wouldn't need my help, but somehow I thought it would come later in life.

But it started in my early 30s.

That it would start at a particular generation where there was an expectation that if they were older, that you would have to have some sort of role in helping them, you know, progress in age and do so with dignity.

And so I definitely understand the point that you're, you're making.

You did say about, uh, you felt like you sacrificed your life and I'm curious, Yosimar, you did say that, you've reflected and you said that it was a calling to be able to help your grandmother, but did you think that there was a moment where you were sacrificing your life in doing things that, or unable to do things that you had already put in your head that you wanted to accomplish as an individual?

Yeah, I think similar to Anita, I think one of the things that happened within my life is we grew up poor.

I think I used to say the term working class, but no, I think we need to name it poverty.

And the thing with being poor is that it's a silent violence cause you're not aware of what you need.

You're not a aware.

And I think poverty adds a different level to these circumstances, um, in which I feel guilty.

And here I am living in Los Angeles in a two bedroom apartment in Boyle Heights having my fun after college years, have roommates, parties, I have my own room, I have my own washer, dryer, I party.

I have all this stability.

And then I would travel back home where my grandma stayed there sleeping on the living room couch.

She's still recycling bottles and cans.

My brother's sleeping on the floor.

I have another cousin in the livingroom.

And I just remember going to visit her and how much I hated the poverty in which she was living.

But she loved it.

This is all she known, this is all known.

And I just felt a certain guilt.

How is it that I'm traveling the country, that I am speaking at these prestigious universities and my grandma is still living in the same apartment that, since we arrived in this country?

And so I think for me, it was a tug of war between upward mobility and realizing if I think defining success for myself, what does success mean?

Is it my career?

Or does success mean getting my family or allowing my family to envision a life of stability?

And so I think it became that huge burden.

And then, yeah, of course there were moments where I didn't want this responsibility.

I wanna be myself.

And then I think, oh the other layer is that we're undocumented.

So it's like this added layer of poverty, undocumented, all this stuff.

And then I think that was the big tug of war of realizing like, damn, like.

I'd see other people excelling in their careers.

I can't do that.

I can move to New York and focus on my writing and live this writer dream because I have these people depending on me.

But I think I would fight it a lot.

I would have these moments of tension in which I was like, ah, why does it have to be me?

Like, I don't want to do this.

But then there was these beautiful, beautiful moments that I was, like, maybe because I'm a poet, I was ah.

It's sacred and something really beautiful and something that I don't think not a lot of people get to experience and then when I had those moments, it just made sense.

I'm curious, Profe Anita, about this tug of war.

Was there a moment because you did mention this, it was a huge sacrifice.

This is not what you wanted, but your life was taken a direction that you had not anticipated.

So was there a time where there was a beautiful moment or what was, what was one of the earliest signs of that this could be a, uh, an opportunity for you to feel grateful for being in this position as a caretaker?

I think it's a fluid experience.

It's not a moment.

It's like you wake up in the morning, you think these babies are beautiful.

They're making you laugh.

You're hugging them and loving them.

And then all of a sudden one of them has a meltdown and you have to go to work and your friends are going out and you're not going out.

Or you used to stay up till two or three in the morning and you had to go sleep.

You're falling asleep at 10 o'clock and can't do your work.

But then you see them sleeping and they look beautiful, right?

So there are many moments where.

You wonder like, wow, like how did this become my experience?

And I feel bad for the kids cause they've heard me multiple times say, like I didn't plan to have children.

My intention was to be child free, not child less, child free.

And so I made the decision because I had already been parenting people.

I had been parenting my mother and my siblings even since I was a young teen because as the um, middle child, I was a mediator of the family.

I was the one that was going to go to college and the one was going to take care of all these things because I was responsible.

And so the fact was I had already been parenting.

And so when I received the children, I did it because I didn't, I love them so much that I didn' want them to be in danger and I have to honor my sister in her choice because someone who is struggling with mental illness or drug addiction, they're not always willing to release their children and let them be taken care of by someone else.

But my sister trusted me.

Thank you for bringing that up about that, as much as we talk about the sacrifice as a caretaker that the person who's being cared for also sacrifices their own understanding of self, their own understanding of family about how they want to navigate the world with someone who's now in charge of them.

But Yosimar I want to ask you something that Profe Anita mentioned, which I feel like I'm going to struggle with is the ability to just be honest with whoever you're caring for and mention the moments of frustration, mention the moments of joy.

And just being transparent about how you're feeling every step of the way.

Was it easy for you to be open and transparent with your grandma about just anything that you were experiencing?

Yeah, I think one of the the funny things about my grandma is that she was witty my grandma was 89 90 but that home girl was sharp.

- Yeah, good for her.

- It's hilarious because we would go out to doctor's appointments, and also I wasn't babying her.

She's an adult.

She's a grown woman, so I wouldn't necessarily baby her.

So if we're arguing at a doctor's office, I'm like, I sure people think this is elder abuse, but this is how we get along.

Like, no, you are both pesados.

This is my home, you know?

I could talk to her.

You know, people, you hear that grandma's in a certain way, but I grew up with her, so she's like my friend.

So, but there was this moment where we would get into it, because... We're so caught up and we would like just fight, right?

And she would get me frustrated because es bien terca she would do things i would argue about her medications uh she one of the things about my grandma is that she didn't trust doctors so she was very much about i'm gonna do it my way and so we would tug a lot - ¡Me están mintiendo!

- Like, "Como, ese doctor no más te quiere enfermo para sacarte dinero."

I'm like, oh, you're on MediCal, you are not paying them, so chill out.

But I think it was just that, but we would argue, I mean, we would fight because, you know, we were getting frustrated and she just needed space.

But then it was funny because obviously my grandma, she was an emotional manipulator.

So she would get mad at me and then shut down.

I'll come home and all the lights are off.

And I'm Okay, this goes- Or she would lock herself or she would go pretend that she's sleeping in the garage.

I'm like, girl, why do you have to sleep in the car?

Do you have a bed?

Like all these emotional and just like, so you're not a mother, you know, all of that.

But then I have to be like the conscientious one.

And I'm, like, OK, she's older.

Let me give in.

And I I'll be like, Abuelita, I just want to apologize to you.

I just wanted to tell you that you're not a burden to me, you're the biggest gift I ever had.

And I am so sorry if I get frustrated with you, but, sometimes this is very difficult because I'm doing so much and I just want to let you know that it's not you I love you and I care for you and then she would be like, I know and then we would hug it out And we would have these episode.

We would have this telenovela episodes.

But then I started to teach my grandma how to use her words instead of these things like hey if you need space you can just tell me hey right now I'm feeling a little sad and it's interesting that she started learning words like siento depresión or me siento triste something that it's not very common.

I don't think it's very common in Latino monolingual Spanish.

Decia, tengo una tristeza.

And then I would like, okay, let's process it.

What do we need to do?

Or like, oh, let me, let us go walk.

And sometimes it was hard because she, I understood she was, my grandma was so isolated.

I think one of the things that people don't realize is that my grandma is very independent.

So she's used to making movidas on her own.

And now because she's older, she can't necessarily go out to the store by herself.

There's certain things that she can't do.

So her life became reduced into somebody watching her.

And I think one of the biggest things that I learned was the fact that this country doesn't facilitate for you to think outside of your immediate needs.

So for someone to come and take time to take her to a restaurant or take time to take it to the park, it was a lot.

And so I think for her also realizing that she needed someone was a very hard, that's when the depression came.

There's a toll that's taken when you're a caretaker, not only like financial toll, time, energy, emotional, mental capacity.

When we do embark on these caretaking journeys, sometimes we're doing it alone, sometimes we're are doing it with other people, or with the expectation that other people are going to be a part of this.

And so it makes sense that as we go about caretaking, that it also affects our relationships with people in our orbit, not just necessarily the person that's in our care.

So I wanna ask you, Profe Anita, if there was a moment where you realize, oh, this new journey I'm on is now affecting how I interact with that older sibling or with any other person, the primos or the primas, even your sister whose story you've shared, how has that been like navigating?

All that you explained comes up, I think, that came up since I was a child.

Like I said, I was the mediator and I do have an older brother, but as many of you know, cis hetero men don't always take on the responsibility of care.

We as women and even queer men have been socialized to be the caretakers, right?

You know, you're not married, you know you're just a queer living your life.

Um, go, go take care of your grandma, go to care of your mom, go take care of, you know, your, your nieces and nephews.

So I think even as a young person, I already had a lot of responsibility on me because I was the only one that went to, uh, well, I was, my sister also went to college, but she got sick in college while she, before she graduated, so I was only one with a middle-class income and even as a grad student, I was making much more money than anybody in my whole family from like literally loans and scholarships.

I've always taken care of my family and I've always wondered why doesn't my brother at least take out the trash for my mom?

Why doesn't he step up and support us and help us?

But he just gave himself a free pass because I didn't even think it was my mom that gave him the free pass.

It was society telling him that as a man, he could just focus on his own life.

I think for the rest of my family I was pretty disappointed also.

That my mother's siblings and nieces and nephews who were all really close, but they didn't help my mom, especially with my sister, because my mom has been taking care of my sister this whole time.

And so I was disappointed because when somebody is dealing with bipolar schizophrenia, Like one of my students said, it's not a, quote, nice disability.

It's a disability that is really challenging and difficult for people to deal with.

So none of my tias or my grandmother were particularly helpful to my mom.

They thought my sister was making up her illness.

They thought she was just being, you know, a B-I-T-C-H. She was being, like, a bad mom.

And so that was one of the things that I really fought back against.

It's like, you don't know what my sister's going through.

She didn't choose this.

Uh, depression or the illness.

And she didn't also change the trauma that we experienced.

And one of the things that I often tell people is we're all one step from that madness because this society and this in poverty and all the isms and phobias, they are attacking our spirits, our bodies and our minds.

I will say that it's been a journey and they have come in to care.

Right.

And so we've called them in.

It was, it's not static.

So like my brother, for example.

He still complains about anything my mom asks him to do, but he's one of her best companions.

He will call her every day.

He will come visit her after work.

He'll ask her, you know, do you want to go out to dinner?

Do you want go to lunch?

So he is one of our companions, even though he's a socialized patriarch and often exhibits that.

And then my tia B, who's my mom's oldest sister, now she understands my sister's illness.

Now she's there for my mom.

When early on it was really difficult.

And I think we're trying to bring our whole family on and educate all of them about disability justice, about how to take care of people with mental illness.

So I don't think just because we're Latinos, Latinas, Latinaxis, that we can't do that work.

It takes a lot of hard conversation.

And because we haven't been taught to say things like that, instead we say things like, ay, mira, mira nomas, who showed up.

Finally, right.

And so we use, um, those little indirect us to like call each other out instead of we're feeling.

For you Yosimar, just because Prof. Anita didn't mention the gender dynamics, right?

I'm talking about this as a man.

There is this expectation that usually the women identified folks are the ones who handle the caretaking.

Did you have to confront that gender politics of being the person in charge, especially because you were taking care of somebody who is of the opposite gender view?

It's so funny.

I feel like my grandma, she's always known I was queer, girl.

I used to wear her skirts when I was in third grade.

Oh, I love that.

She's always been like, I Love you.

I just want you to be happy.

Even though we never really discussed it, she's like, okay, estás bien.

And she would be always be the one like, you need to have a kid because who's gonna take care of you when you're older.

I don't want kids.

But then she's, like, how about you adopt one of these?

She will be like, Adopta Alguien, Adopta Alguien, you know?

And we would be like this baby.

It's like Adopt Ais.

So like, girl, she's not gonna give me her baby.

But it also helped that I was queer that I'm queer because there's other things that I took into account Let's go do our nails.

She never had done her nails never pampered herself And so that became our thing like oh, let's go to our nails We go to the store and I would make fun of her because she dressed like an old lady I like girl.

No, we we got a juge it up.

Let's buy some cute little clothes.

But she was always about frugal about spending and like no girl, let spend it.

Let spend it but I think that was important for me to understand that caregiving was more than medication.

It's more like, how do you create an environment that my grandma is also expanding her imagination and realizing, oh, I deserve to have all these things.

And it feels nice to be pretty, it feels to do my hair, it feels that I'm spending on things that I shouldn't spend and not to worry about it.

And so I think being queer definitely helped with that because I was like, girl, we're not gonna have you out here looking like that.

And I would tease her all the time.

She would be like, ay ya yay.

I love that you say this because I distinctly remember there was one time my mom took her mother to the beauty salon and because I was attached to my mom I was like I'll go with you and I remember my grandmother she was probably in her early 80s she was getting her hair washed and my mom looked at me she said a woman always wants to look good no matter her age and I loved that she would take that moment to take my grandmother to have her little pamper moment so I always think about that so I'm glad that mentioned it.

Profe Anita, I want to ask because Part of the caretaking journey sometimes is that there's a difference of generations.

So I'm wondering if you had to deal with this interesting perspective of you're having to communicate with youngins who might not understand where you're coming from because the lived experience is so different.

Yeah, that's a great question.

Um, I think I, as a, as, a first gen college educated person, I was already dealing with that, all of this, like, it's, I, when I talk about the kids, I can't talk about it without talking about my mom too.

So from the very beginning, like when I first read Gloria and Zaldua Borderlands, La Frontera, right.

I called my mom up.

I'm like, mom, why didn't you teach me more Spanish?

Like I used to speak Spanish before I started school.

Like, why didn't you continue?

And she's like, Miha, they used to punish us, hit us with rulers, the white nuns would punish us for speaking in Spanish.

So I taught you English so that they wouldn't do that to you.

And so I did the work of teaching my mom what Chicana meant, what feminist meant.

I taught her about colorism because my family is the darker one.

So little by little, I was trying to teach my mom.

Also reclaim our cultural identity and our pride and like remove all of the internalized racism that we had we had grown up with, similar to the sexism, etc.

So when the kids came into my life, I did the same thing with them.

Like I said, they were three and four years old.

And I remember distinctly Michael either was three or four.

And he asked me like, Honey, why do you have a girlfriend?

I had a girlfriend at the time.

It was my first partner after I became a parent.

And I said, oh, that's because I love her and I'm in a relationship with her.

She's my girlfriend.

And he said, but why don't you have a boyfriend?

I said well, I actually, and at the time I identified as bisexual and I identify as queer and fluid.

But I said I'm bisexual.

So that means I can love boys or girls and it doesn't matter to me, you know, if they're a boy or a girl.

I can still love them.

And he said, you know what, Honey, I think I'm bisexual too, four years old.

And he says, you don't want Honey, I think on bisexual too.

And I was like, oh, okay.

Well, just so you know, whoever you love, whoever you want to be a boyfriend or girlfriend, that I will celebrate that.

Like I forget exactly what I said, but that's always gonna be accepted in our home.

I will say, uh, one of the things that's possible when you're physically with someone is getting to talk at all hours of the day, you know, during dinner, whenever the moment feels right and just learning about the person you're with.

And so I want to ask you, starting with you, Yosimar.

What is something that you learned from your grandmother that you don't think he would have ever had the chance to do unless you had all of that access to her?

My grandma, you know, passed away in November, and I think not just because she passed away, I think I always view my grandma as like this magical person.

I'm like, oh, it takes a really powerful person to raise a little queer child and to not murder their spirit.

And my grandma never did that.

My grandma was an alcahueta.

If I wanted something, she would make it work.

My grandma maybe was that because she was trying to make up for the mother that she couldn't be to her daughters.

And that's when I got a complex idea of my grandma.

My grandma was in survival mode.

And so her way of parenting her daughters was probably not the kindess or not the most.

And so now that she's older, she's confronting that because everything comes back.

And so maybe the relationship with her daughters is not that close or it's turbulent because they haven't spoken about this and there hasn't been a sorry.

And so I think there was this constant thing.

But for me, I can't speak to that because my grandmother was never that to me.

And so I had the patience that not only my mom or my aunt necessarily didn't have with her, but I did.

And I think what I learned was that to view my grandmother's life with compassion and now that she's older, to confront her or to talk to her and see, listen, maybe it's time you forgive yourself.

for what you didn't do and think about the things that you did do.

And so I think the most biggest thing of spending time with someone that's elderly and someone that is confronting their mortality is making sure that they make amends with the guilt or the shame that they carry.

And so, I'm happy to say that I was helping my grandma gravitate through that and that I was able to her to honor.

You were on survival mode.

It's not your fault.

And look.

Look how far you've made it.

Look how you've shifted.

And yes, you've *** up.

There's moments that you've got as a human life.

It's not that.

But I want you to tell you that at the end of the day, the impact in your legacy, the way people speak about your character, the way the people thank you for the things that you have done to them, for them, it's very dynamic.

So you also need to be kind to yourself.

And so I think that was the biggest thing, to be able to look at my grandma.

In the complexities of the things where she did mess up, but also the compassion of saying you did the best that you could with what you had.

Thank you for sharing that.

Profe Anita, I want to ask you sort of the inverse of that, especially because we started this conversation with you talking about the very real sensation of this is not how you thought your life was going to go.

So what is something you learned about yourself now that you are "Honey" and, uh, you've been doing this for almost 20 years.

I think the thing that I learned about myself was that I had to figure out a way to take care of myself and my body, mind and spirit even while I was taking care of everyone else.

Even before I got the kids, I already was putting other people's needs before my own.

I was a people pleaser, always wanted everybody.

To love me and to accept me, especially because I grew up thinking I was unlovable.

I grew a different, I have a different hand and a lot of people bully me for my hand and I thought I would grow up to not have love.

And so I think with the kids, I realized like I have to figure out what I need to heal myself because I wanna be a parent that parents from a space of healing, that parents from a space of, of, liberation versus fear.

I was living my life through my mom's trauma.

And so I had to figure out how to heal, release her trauma and heal my own trauma.

And I don't think I would have gotten as far as I have without the kids.

They hold me accountable.

They use my words against me.

They throw my feminism in my face and they say they're not as easily convinced when I tell them something is good or bad.

They challenged me and I like my mom taught me I taught them you have a voice.

- It sounds like it is a very symbiotic relationship, regardless, that once you get into this role, once you assume a different type of responsibility than what you might have anticipated, that there is a mutual learning, there is mutual growth, there's so much that can be taken from.

What in the instance that it happens might feel jarring, but that it might be a fruitful experience overall.

I want to thank each of you for opening up and being as vulnerable as you have on this very difficult topic, but I think it.

It's helping me, I think it's helping other folks who are on the precipice of this journey for themselves.

And so I can't thank you enough for taking the time to really go in depth about what this experience has been like for you.

So I wanna thank you each for that.

And I want to tell our listeners that if you wanna follow our guests, I will put all of their socials where you can find them online, all of the written works that will all be in the show notes.

And if you want to communicate with us as a hyphenation show.

You can send us an email at HYP at KQED.org so we can know what you want to talk about on our program.

But again, just want to say thanks to our guests and thanks to you for being here for this chat.

Until next time.